Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Tulika
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 334
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185229864
Description
Why were some countries able to build developmental states in the decades after World War II while others were not? Through a richly detailed examination of India’s experience, locked in Place argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. During the 1950s an 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state.
Chibber contrasts India’s experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country.
Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India’s post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power.
REVIEWS
Vivek Chibber’s locked in Place is a brilliant, benchmark study of the developmental state and its dilemmas. Over the past two decades there has been a steady move away from systematic class analysis of state strategies toward state-centric approaches. Chibber decisively brings class back in in a nuanced and penetrating investigation of how class strategies constrain and intersect the institutional logics of developmental states.
-ERIK OLIN WRIGHT
A truly outstanding book. Chibber presents a novel, powerful, and controversial central thesis that will be of great interest to scholars in the filed. He beautifully elaborates the expected consequences of this thesis for comparative historical cases, and presents two critically important, contrasting cases to great effect, with lucidity and élan. The empirical matter is substantial but is always presented economically and with modesty. The text is extremely well written. The provocative conclusions will, as they should, unquestionably stimulate a raft of further questions and new research.
-ROBERT BRENNER
This book is an excellent piece of scholarship and an important contribution both to the ongoing comparative debate on the role of the state in development and to our understanding of India as a significant and weighty case within that debate. Marked by careful, detailed historical research and unrelenting engagement with general analytical issues, it will be an invaluable resource for future scholars trying to understand the emergence of the post-colonial state in India.
-PETER EVANS
Contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
PART I: THE ISSUES AND THE ARGUMENT
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
CHAPTER 2
Late Development and State-Building
PART II: INSTALLING THE STATE
CHAPTER 3
The Origins of the Developmental State in Korea
CHAPTER 4
Precursors to Planning in India: The Myth of the Developmental Bourgeoisie
CHAPTER 5
The Demobilization of the Labor Movement
CHAPTER 6
The Business Offensive and the Retreat of the State
PART III: REPRODUCING THE STATE
CHAPTER 7
State Structure and Industrial Policy
CHAPTER 8
Locked in Place: Explaining the Non-Occurrence of Reform
CHAPTER 9
Conclusion
EPILOGUE
The Decline of Development Models
Notes
Bibliography
Index